shulamithbond:

peculiar-doll:

You can tell Discworld is a fantasy series because the City Watch is committed to protecting and serving the people, to the extent where orders from the government are disobeyed and disregarded because they infringe on the peoples’ rights. The cops say “we’re officers of the law, not soldiers of the government” and mean it. During a revolution, the police fought against the government because the government was hurting the people. Also trolls and dwarves.

naointeressaaninguem:

you know those things, when you were a kid, you felt were hurtful but you couldn’t quite figure out why they were hurtful and unfair and you couldn’t explain why the other person was wrong from doing them?

well, this is one of them.

iwriteaboutfeminism:

Protesters march through Shaw, blocking multiple intersections.

Part Two

Sunday, November 23rd

iwriteaboutfeminism:

New leaders organize a protest in Shaw, the neighborhood where VonDerrit Myers was killed.

Part One

Sunday, Novemeber 23rd

“

they will not write about us because darling
we’re not in love
and we both know that poems ought to be about lovers
or brothers
not best friends halfway in the middle
god, i’d never kiss you
but our hands fit like puzzle pieces and your smile makes my heart sing and you cried when you said you love me
voice thick with fear and awe and i knew then i could break you and that terrifies me because you deserve better but i would die for you

when i was thirteen my bedroom window looked out on the big dipper every summer and it made me feel safe but if every star in that constellation went out i’d still have your hands smoothing a brush through my hair (your eyes shine brighter than those distant suns anyway)

we are not the stuff of legends in this world where it’s only love if you fuck the stories people want to hear end in a kiss not a high five or a fistbump but if i’ve got you i don’t need to make history

and while you do not kiss away my tears you let them seep into your shirt and to me, that is just as good

”

- not every beautiful thing has to be a love story (g.c.r.)

“Imagine if DC had the courage to do to Wonder Woman what Marvel did with Thor, by heightening the culture clash between an Amazonian and modern Americans. Imagine how much fun you’d get if she was routinely confused by the casual sexism of our culture!

Imagine how much joy it would give audiences if, because she comes from a matriarchal culture, she didn’t know how to behave in traditionally feminine ways, and how much fun it would be to see how that challenges people. Hell, just imagine if she saw every bit of rude sexist behavior as a challenge to fight her, because she doesn’t have the framework to understand that’s just how it is.

Instead, we’ll probably get like one or two mildly feminist moments before she recedes into a character that is supposed to be strong but also non-threatening. In real life, a woman who has never known sexism in her life would be totally threatening to nearly everyone. There is no way they are going to have fun with that, though.”

-

Amanda Marcotte, Don’t get too excited about a Wonder Woman Movie (via autisticbobsaginowski)

"a woman who has never known sexism in her life would be totally threatening to nearly everyone."

(via veliseraptor)

Things I Did Not Know I Needed Until Right This Second: this

(via thedatingfeminist)

Wouldn’t it be great if someone else made a faux WW movie along these exact lines?  Or at the very least, wrote a book about a character raised in such a culture who comes to ours and the shock?  I’d read it!

raptorific:

Swear to god, some guys are terrified that girls are faking common interests to impress them and act really hostile towards anyone they even SUSPECT of doing such a thing

but then they turn around and fake a whole friendship in the hopes of getting sex out of girls, and get mad at them when it doesn’t work

and they super do not see the irony in that

“Iggy profits from the cultural performativity and forms of survival that Black women have perfected, without having to encounter and deal with the social problem that is the Black female body, with its perceived excesses, unruliness, loudness and lewdness. If she existed in hip hop at a moment when Black women could still get play, where it would take more than one hand to count all the mainstream Black women rap artists, I would have no problem. Iggy would be one among the many. But in this moment, she represents a problem of co-optation. She represents the ways in which hip hop is on a crash course to take exactly the path that rock ‘n roll took such that 20 years from now, people my nephew’s age, will look at the Macklemores and Iggys of the world as representative of Hip Hop Culture, with nary a Black soul making their top ten list of hip hop greats.”

-

Iggy Azalea’s post-racial mess: America’s oldest race tale, remixed

As a white female rapper mistakes appropriation for artistry, here’s how black women remain pushed to the sidelines

BRITTNEY COOPER

(via unapproachableblackchicks)

iwriteaboutfeminism:

Protesters are met with a strong police presence in Ferguson.

Part 1 of ?

Saturday, November 22nd

petermorwood:

garrettbrobinson:

margaretems:

by Craig Davison

Oh my god I can’t take these.

Not just great artwork, but I’ve never seen “imagination in action” captured so well.

iwriteaboutfeminism:

Dissatisfaction in Ferguson.

Saturday, November 22nd

iwriteaboutfeminism:

CBS falsely reported that the FBI arrested two men for allegedly making a pipe bomb to be used during protests in Ferguson.

The truth is that they were arrested on firearms charges.

Saturday, November 22nd

Part 2 of 2

Part 1

getinvolvedyoulivehere:

A Couple Returning Home Startled Cops in Stairwell, So a Cop Shot the Man in the Chest, Killing Him

“They didn’t present themselves or nothing and shot him. They didn’t identify themselves at all. They just shot.”
Read more » http://bit.ly/1xceUAN

bustamimes:

Stop what you’re doing right now and watch Alex Boye’s “Africanized” cover of Shake It Off.

oxboxer:

When you get past the cultural quirks, they’re not so different from us.

Also on Tapastic!

This photo of a note to parents, purportedly printed on a pamphlet included in a LEGO set from the 1970s, has been making laps around the Internet. The legitimacy of the note, which is noteworthy for its egalitarian tone, has been called into question – but there's good reason to believe it's real.

Read more...

This isn’t a real post.  It was a rambling email I was writing to my sister and then it sort of got away from me and so I decided to flesh it out and share it here because maybe we weren’t the only ones who were taught this song in school.  You can ignore it if you want.

When I was little there was this song called “Mama Paquita” that we’d have to sing in music class.  According to our music books, it was a 1930’s Brazilian Carnivale song but it was kinda fucked up.  It was about some salesman trying to convince a mom to buy her baby a banana, a papaya, some pajamas and a sombrero, but she was like “Who has infant-sombrero money in this economy?  Let’s go dancing!” (I’m paraphrasing, but only slightly) and I remember thinking, “Why would a baby need a sombrero?“

(Side-note: I just googled” “Why would you buy a baby a sombrero?” and I got a lot of vaguely racist pictures, and also a link to a poem, which includes the lines “He had heard stories of a baby sombrero wrestler who would one day rule the world, but he had never thought that it would be his son” and “Hey, do you want to go get some soup, and maybe have a baby?” {Which might be the best pick-up line ever.  Or worst.  Depends on who you’re trying to pick up, I guess.})

Anyway, when I was in third grade I asked the music teacher why we didn’t just  sing the original Brazilian song, Mamãe eu Quero, (which I’d memorized from Carmen Miranda movies and old Tom & Jerry cartoons) but she shook her head disdainfully, saying only that there were “too many nipples in that song”.

I was confused about that for years, but in high school I told a friend that I knew the words to a risqué Brazilian nipple song, which I then sang.  She knew a little Portuguese, and she told me my song was about breastfeeding and that my pronunciation was atrocious.  Then I said, “Oh wait.  It gets worse” and I sang her the bastardized English version from my childhood music classes, and she was like, “What kind of racist bullshit is that?” and I said, “The extremely problematic kind taught to small children in the 70’s?”

Then she looked at me in confused bewilderment and I nodded in embarrassed agreement and said, “Honestly, I don’t understand it either.  I apologize on the behalf of white people.”  (Which is a phrase I should just put on a t-shirt because that shit needs to be said A LOT).  She gracefully accepted my apology and offered to teach me how to curse convincingly in Spanish if I agreed to never sing that song again.  Our cultural bridge was built on a shared love of profanity, and although I never mastered the accent to her satisfaction, I will forever treasure the phrase: “I SHIT ON EVERYTHING THAT MOVES!” which is easily the best thing to scream when you are stuck in traffic, or when the copier eats your overdue report, or when life is just being an asshole in general.

This was all before the internet existed so I had to take my friend’s word on the translation, but then my sister reminded me of that song again and so I decided to go online to try to translate the Portuguese version.

And here is the (probably horribly butchered) translation:

Mommy I want, mommy I want,
Mommy I want to suckle!
Give the nipple, give the nipple, give the nipple
Give the nipple so your baby won’t cry!

Sleep, son of my heart.
Take the bottle and join my dance party.
I have a sister, she’s called Anna.
She blinked so much she lost her eyelashes.

I look at the little ones, but this way
I’m sorry I’m not suckling.
I have a sister, she’s phenomenal.
She’s the boss and her husband’s an imbecile.

And now I’m even more confused, and I can’t get the fucked-up English version out of my head.  And (if you were also taught it as a small kid) it’s probably stuck in yours too now.

Awesome.

I am part of the problem.

PS.  Again, I would like to apologize on the behalf of white people.  Seriously.  White people fuck shit up for all of us.  Including white people.  It’s baffling.  I’m so sorry.  Let’s go get some soup and maybe have a baby.

Meet the Auburn Tigers, Australia’s first all Muslim Woman Football Team! 

“

I know a woman in her 30s: she’s married, she has a toddler, and she desperately wants a second child – but a dangerous medical condition means that having another baby would be life-threatening. Despite being careful, she got pregnant. She had an abortion because she wasn’t willing to risk her life and leave her child motherless, but she still feels a deep sadness.

I know another woman, in her 20s, who had a shitty boyfriend (but no kids) when her birth control failed and she found herself with a pregnancy she knew she didn’t want – a pregnancy she wasn’t ready for. She was upset about the situation, but had no doubts about what she wanted to do and, after the abortion, no regrets. She rarely thinks about the pregnancy or the abortion anymore.

If you’re like a lot of people, you probably have much more sympathy for the first woman than the second. Though the majority of people in America and Northern Ireland and so many other places believe abortion should be legal, too many of us still think about reproductive rights as if there’s a hierarchy of good and bad abortions – the kind that women “deserve”, and the kind women should be ashamed of.

But those two women? They’re both me.

”

-

It’s OK to tell your abortion story, my contribution to #1in3speaks  (via jessicavalenti)

This is damn powerful.

(via katillacs)

Flashback Friday.

In a great book, The Averaged American, sociologist Sarah Igo uses case studies to tell the intellectual history of statistics, polling, and sampling. The premise is fascinating:  Today we’re bombarded with statistics about the U.S. population, but this is a new development.  Before the science developed, the concept was elusive and the knowledge was impossible. In other words, before statistics, there was no “average American.”

There are lots of fascinating insights in her book, but a post by Byron York brought one in particular to mind.  Here’s a screenshot of his opening lines (emphasis added by Jay Livingston):

The implication here is, of course, that Black Americans aren’t “real” Americans and that including them in opinion poll data is literally skewing the results.

Scientists designed the famous Middletown study with exactly this mentality.  Trying to determine who the average American was, scientists excluded Black Americans out of hand.  Of course, that was in the 1920s and ’30s.  How wild to see the same mentality in the 2000s.

Originally posted in 2009.

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College and the co-author of Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

nolan finley: you have a lot of these folks out there saying detroit shouldn't be charging people for water.


jessica williams: who have you heard literally ask for free water?


nf: if you don't pay your bills, you're assuming that you can get your water for free.


jw: so is it possible that the people that aren't paying don't want FREE water, they want a payment plan adjusted to their income?


nf: absolutely it's possible


jw: so, i have a question. (finley nods)


jw: by framing it as saying, "people just want free water," which no one has actually said, are you somewhat misleading this argument right now?


nf: in what — in what sense? (jess is stunned silent)

sideniggasociety:

ofmyheadandheart:

Intrepid reporter Jessica Williams of The Daily Show talks to columnist Nolan Finley of The Detroit News. [full segment]

ilikeher

She too real

upyourcactus:

whenwilligetmyrights:

“Every time someone says we don’t need feminism anymore, things like this come to mind. Due to insufficient dowry this young girl’s husband lacerated her face with a razor blade.” (Gwalior - India) - ph. Adrian Fisk

if you say you don’t need feminism, you are selfish. selfish that you have not stop to think about the millions of girls and women and trans women who are either getting killed, mutilated, raped, or sold into sex slavery and child marriages. for fucks sake, the women’s right to vote in the US isnt even a hundred years old yet. women in the work force is still recent. the first american women to go into  space was in 1983. the firs women to be credited for a marvel movie just happened. like firsts are still happening. and women are still getting murdered for being women. WE NEED FEMINISM. 

“"Why do men feel threatened by women?" I asked a male friend of mine. So this male friend of mine, who does by the way exist, conveniently entered into the following dialogue. "I mean," I said, "men are bigger, most of the time, they can run faster, strangle better, and they have on the average a lot more money and power." "They’re afraid women will laugh at them," he said. "Undercut their world view." Then I asked some women students in a quickie poetry seminar I was giving, "Why do women feel threatened by men?" "They’re afraid of being killed," they said.”

- Margaret Atwood, from Second Words: Selected Critical Prose, 1960-1982 (via booksmatter)

 Finn Mackay speaks at Feminism in London, 2013

corvuscoronefashion-photography:

Painting The Roses Red 

"The Queen she likes ‘em red
If she saw white instead
She’d raise a fuss
And each of us
Would quickly lose his head”

Based around the idea of “painting the roses red” in the Alice in Wonderland book and have used fake blood on a white rose to point in the direction of beheading (as, of course, nothing I do is ever really “innocent”) - especially as the Queen of Hearts is very well known with the phrase “Off with his head!”

Model: Jade
Photo by: https://www.facebook.com/CorvusCoroneFashionPhotography

04/10/13